Chapter One

Oprah Rising

Life is like a great big roller coaster. Everything in life
don't happen like it's suppose to.

—Outkast, "Humble Mumble"

For those who wish to know the spiritual journey of Oprah
Winfrey, there is a fracture, a fault line, that must be recognized.
It separates all that came before it in her religious life from
all that would unfold after. It is a partition in time of the kind historians
delight in, a turning point like those in the novelist's tale,
and it is essential to understanding what would become the Oprah
Winfrey brand of faith.

This great divide occurred when she was in her twenties
and working as a reporter at Baltimore's WJZ-TV. She was also
attending Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in those
days, and it was there, on a Sunday morning as she sat listening to
a sermon by the Reverend John Richard Bryant, that the rupture
began. The theme for the day was the oft-repeated Old Testament
assertion that God is "a jealous God" (see Ex. 20:5). Winfrey later
recalled the moment:

I was just sitting there thinking for the first time after being
raised a Baptist ... church, church, church, Sunday, Sunday,
Sunday ... I thought, "Now why would God, who is omnipotent,
who has everything, who was able to create me and raise
the sun every morning, why would that God be jealous of anything
that I have to say? Or be threatened by a question that I
would have to ask?"

Doubt settled into her soul. What she had been taught of
God and Christianity all those years in church suddenly seemed
uncertain. She began reaching for some broader, more accessible
scheme of truth than what she had been told. Nearly by the end
of Bryant's sermon, Winfrey had taken her first steps toward a
new faith. "I was raised to not question God. It's a sin. But I
started to think for myself ... and that's when I really started,
in my mid-twenties, my own journey towards my spirituality, my
spiritual self."

It was the kind of epiphany upon which destinies turn, and yet
it is surprising that a single theme from a single sermon might lead
to so much. It is particularly surprising given that Winfrey might
easily have drawn far different conclusions about God being a jealous
God from the ones that she did, as we shall see.

Obviously, other factors were at work in her soul. Undoubtedly,
there were already fissures in her faith before that Baltimore
Sunday morning. There had to be more than just one troubling
sermon to account for the new trajectory of her spiritual life and
for her discarding of much that she had taken as true before that
day. Given the implications of this breach both for Winfrey and for
the world, we should ponder her life prior to that critical moment
for some understanding of how this turning point came about.

The Mississippi Years

Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on January
29, 1954. A town of some six thousand at the time, Kosciusko was
named for a Polish general who fought on the side of colonial
forces in the American Revolution. Perhaps some of his heroism
seeped into the people of the tiny Mississippi community. Its other
famous citizen was James Meredith, the courageous civil rights
leader who was the first African American to risk enrolling at the
University of Mississippi.

There has been much debate and mythmaking about Winfrey's
childhood, and it has obscured the hard facts and harder experience
of black life in rural Mississippi in those days. It has also
obscured the character and drive of the people who are the true
heroes of the Oprah Winfrey story.

Young Oprah Gail was born to an unwed mother, Vernita Lee,
but was raised in the arms of an extended family of such faith, generosity,
and affection that it is not hard to understand how greatness
might arise from it. At the heart of this family was Hattie Mae,
Oprah's grandmother. A stern but loving and industrious woman,
Hattie Mae was the granddaughter of slaves and possessed only
a third-grade education. Her husband, Earlist, never did learn to
read. Yet she would raise six children, and she would create such a
gracious and virtuous culture around her that it would influence
her famous granddaughter all her days.

We should remember that this was during the darkest season of
the Mississippi story, when the state was the poorest in the nation,
when racism roamed the night in white sheets, and when poverty
crushed African American lives underfoot. For rural blacks, indoor
plumbing was as much a dream as respect from white society. A
black man faced with an approaching white on a town sidewalk
was expected to step into the street when he passed. To vote was,
in some parts of the state, to risk one's life. Lynchings were not
unknown, and wise blacks taught their children to distinguish
good whites from bad whites as a skill of survival. Faced with such
conditions, blacks clung to their faith, to each other, and to the
belief that character and righteousness would ultimately prevail.
These certainties produced the nobility and determination that
eventually became the bedrock of the civil rights movement.

Of character and righteousness Hattie Mae Lee knew much.
She is remembered as the warm center of her family and an
influence for faith and good works in her town. To help keep
her family fed, she cooked each day for the local sheriff's office.
She was also a skilled homemaker and had the devotion and
discipline to transform a wooden house three miles outside the
city limits into a thing of beauty, a gathering place lovingly
remembered through the years. Katharine Carr Esters, Oprah's
cousin, recalls that

Aunt Hat kept a spotless house.... It was a wooden, six-room
house with a large living room that had a fireplace and rocking
chairs. There were three big windows with white Priscilla-style
lace curtains. The dining room was filled with beautiful
Chippendale furniture. And in Aunt Hat's bedroom she had this
beautiful white bedspread across her bed that all the kids knew
was off-limits for playing on.

It is now well known that the unusual name "Oprah" came about
as the result of a clerical error. Vernita, likely shaken and unsure at
the birth of her first child, allowed her Aunt Ida to suggest the new
baby's name. It would be "Orpah," Ida decided. This was an odd
choice. Orpah was the obscure name of the sister-in-law of the biblical
figure Ruth. According to the ancient story, the two women
married brothers who soon died. Ruth decided to stay with her
mother-in-law, Naomi, and care for her in her old age. Orpah, after
much weeping and show of affection, simply left. She would become
a symbol of showy emotion without commitment, and according to
the Jewish historian Josephus, she would also become an ancestor of
the fearsome giant, Goliath, nemesis of King David. Orpah was not
a name that would have evoked noble themes for those who knew
their Scripture, and perhaps this is what Ida intended. Fortunately,
the midwife at the child's birth, Rebecca Presley, inverted the letters
in the biblical name and entered "Oprah" instead.

There was another oddity on the birth certificate. The father
of Oprah Gail Lee was listed as a man named Vernon Winfrey.
Vernita had identified him as one of three men she had been with
and the most likely candidate for father of the child. Vernon, a tall,
slim, kindly man who worked as a coal miner, took Vernita at her
word and accepted Oprah as his own. He would become the only
father she would ever know, and he would do much to shape Oprah's
character and thus the woman the world would one day celebrate.
Years later he would realize that he was not the child's father. By
then, it wouldn't matter. He had invested too much, loved too deeply.
Oprah had already become his child in every sense that mattered.

Since Oprah's mother was an unwed teenager who worked off
and on as a maid, mother and daughter lived in Hattie Mae's home
and enjoyed the fruits of that kind woman's character and liberality.
The family was poor by nearly every standard, but hunger was
always kept at bay and the home was filled with storytelling, laughter,
and warmth. By all accounts, Oprah lacked for nothing. Her
grandmother doted on her. Hattie Mae worked for a wealthy white
family named Leonard, owners of the main department store in
the area. Often Hattie Mae would return home from work carrying
clothes, toys, and books the Leonards had sent along as gifts.
Little Oprah had everything the Leonards' daughters had, family
members recall, and this was an astonishing grace given the times
and the vast economic chasm between black and white.

Besides providing richly for her granddaughter, Hattie Mae
also fashioned her early character. "I remember when I was 4
watching my grandma boil clothes in a huge iron pot," Oprah
has said.

I was crying, and Grandma asked, "What's the matter with
you, girl?" "Big Mammy," I sobbed, "I'm going to die someday."
"Honey," she said, "God don't mess with his children. You
gotta do a lot of work in your life and not be afraid. The strong
have got to take care of the others." I later came to realize that
my grandmother was loosely translating from the epistle of
Romans in the New Testament—"We that are strong ought to
bear the infirmities of the weak" (15:1). Despite my age, I somehow
grasped the concept. I knew I was going to help people,
that I had a higher calling, so to speak.

On Sundays, the child was dressed up and trotted off to
Buffalo Baptist Church. It was there, as in Hattie Mae's home,
that the essentials of the Christian faith were embedded in young
Oprah's soul. Books and materials being in short supply, children
were encouraged to learn their "pieces"—memorized Bible verses
and stories, favorite religious poems—and to recite them often
before appreciative grown-ups. It was how a caring community
assured that their faith lived on in the next generation. At home,
Hattie Mae taught her granddaughter the Bible stories so dear to
her. This was done with drama and devotion. Oprah took to it
with zeal. In time, she perfected the story of Daniel from what
she had learned from Hattie Mae and from the poetry of the black
pulpit. She delighted in retelling the tale and was not beyond playfully
hitting an adult to announce the start of a performance. She
came to love Scripture, first its drama and later its meaning, and
this early religious education served to awaken both her imagination
and her gift for oratory.

It is touching to consider how devoted to learning Hattie Mae's
family was. The common slur is that rural Mississippi negroes of
the era were ignorant and happy to be so, that an innate practicality
of mind kept them from valuing higher thought and literacy.
It is a lie. Though Hattie Mae had only a third-grade education
she taught Oprah the shapes of her letters as soon as the child
would sit still long enough. An uncle then taught Oprah to read.
In fact, she was so well taught at home in those early years that
when she began school she had already learned sufficiently to
bypass kindergarten and enter the first grade. This was fruit of the
family's understanding—an understanding widely shared in the
black community through the influence of Booker T. Washington
and others—that education would empower the black man's rise.
Oprah's cousin, Katharine, absorbed this belief and later became
the first in the family to earn a college degree. "It took me twelve
years of night school to get that diploma, but I finally did it ... I
bought a thesaurus and read it like a novel."

Katharine's achievement could not have been made easier by the
economic devastation that befell her community in the late 1950s.
Apponaug Cotton Mill, the town's largest employer, closed and jobs
became so scarce that many blacks in the area decided to move north
in hope of work. They thus joined what became known as the Second
Great Migration of southern blacks into northern cities like Detroit,
Chicago, and Milwaukee. Already two million had moved north in
the First Great Migration of 1920 to 1930. Now, for the same reasons
as before—southern racism, northern economic opportunity,
and hope—five million more made their way north from 1940 to
1970. Oprah's mother was among them. In 1958, realizing that there
was no future for her as a maid in a declining economy, Vernita
asked her Aunt Katharine to drive her to Milwaukee. Oprah stayed
behind. She was four and a half and spent the next eighteen months
of her life being raised by her grandparents.

Vernon, Vernita, and the War in Oprah's Soul

What the family recounts in hushed tones is that Vernita was soon
swept up in the loose morals of a big northern city. She spent her
money unwisely and gave her heart and her bed to a succession of
men. She had a second daughter, Patricia, by one man in 1959 and
then her first son, Jeffrey, by another man in 1960. She was in her
mid-twenties, away from her moorings and caught up in a lifestyle
she could not control. It would mark Oprah's life all her days that
at this moment she rejoined her mother in Milwaukee. Her grandfather
had recently died and this left sixty-year-old Hattie Mae to
raise the child nearly alone. Soon in ill health, she could no longer
bear the responsibility, and Oprah was shipped north.

It did not take long before all concerned realized that Oprah
could not live permanently with her mother. Vernita and baby
Patricia lived in a boarding house with rooms so tiny that Oprah
had to sleep on the porch when she arrived. Having raced through
a succession of low-paying jobs, Vernita was finally on welfare, and
there was barely enough money to care for the two children, given
their mother's habits. It was then that Vernon Winfrey reentered
Oprah's life.

By 1959, Vernon was living in Nashville, Tennessee, and working
for Vanderbilt University as a janitor. His life was pleasant. He
had married Zelma Myers in 1958, a marriage that was happy and
lasted until her death decades later. They lived in a brick house in
East Nashville and were committed to their Baptist church and
their community. Vernon had changed since those earlier, wilder
days during which he had become embroiled with Vernita. He was
more settled now, more dignified. He had become a man of genuine
faith. Tall and lean with kind but somewhat sad eyes, he had
come to understand the kind of character that was worth having,
that would lead a man to better things. When he became a barber
and opened his own shop, he hung a sign that proclaimed, "Live
So the Preacher Won't Have to Tell Lies at Your Funeral." The
words summarized the manner of the man.

When Vernita could no longer care for Oprah, the child was
sent to live with Vernon. This began a season of shuttling her
between Milwaukee and Nashville that left its mark. As Vernon
later said, "It was a mistake. King Solomon taught long ago that
you can't divide a child." Still, Vernon gave it his best. As an antidote
to Vernita's meager, unstable world, Vernon offered love,
discipline, and rootedness. "We welcomed Oprah and gave her
a proper home with structure—schooling, regular visits to the
library, a little bit of television, playtime, and church every single
Sunday. I'd drive us to the Baptist church in my old 1950 Mercury
and cover the seats to keep the lint off our clothes." There were
children to play with in the neighborhood, trees to climb, and a
community that pulled together in adversity. Oprah thrived and
became the sweet, responsive child Vernon knew she could be.

In 1963, though, she returned to Milwaukee to be with her
mother. This devastated Vernon. He knew what had happened.
Oprah had chafed a bit under his stern rule and had complained
to Vernita. Nearly ten and longing for greater freedom, Oprah
yearned in particular to watch more television than Vernon
allowed. Vernita, seeing her opportunity, told her daughter that if
she would return to Milwaukee she could watch all the television
she desired. Oprah took the bait and returned to Milwaukee. "I
never saw that sweet little girl again," Vernon lamented years later.
"The innocent child that I knew in Nashville disappeared forever
when I left her with her mother. I shed tears that day because I
knew I was leaving her in a bad environment that was no place for
a young child, but there was nothing I could do about it."